“Like ugly Asian babies, valid superstitions don’t exist. At best, any perceived effect of a superstition is you merely psyching yourself out. Think of it as an asshole placebo.”

“If you want to get rid of the perceived meaning of curse words, you’ll have to get rid of the feelings which bring their use, and that’s not going to happen.”

“Christians are notorious for acting like used car salesmen, treating non-Christians as if they’re standing there holding a blank check and sporting a hard-on for unreliable vehicles.”

“People play the lottery all the time unaware of how mind-bogglingly difficult it is to win. It seems like they take a different approach to probabilities. Their rationale must be, “Well, I can either win it or not win it, so my odds of winning are 50/50.”

“If a couple of gay guys want to throw the gayest, most fabulous wedding of all time, the only way it should offend you is if you weren’t invited.”

“The ancient bond between the tsarist state and Russian nationalism could be used to create powerful emotions when the enemy came from the heathen east. The Mongol invasion had left a powerful mark on the Russian psyche. It was expressed in a deep anxiety about the mixed Eurasian roots of the people and it's culture, which made it easy for an educated liberal to convince themselves that this war was nothing less than a defense of Russia's European identity against the Asian hordes.”

“Whereas in Western countries the constitution merely had to guarantee the rights of a per-existing civil society and culture, in Russia it also had to create these. It had to educate society - and the state itself - into the values and ideas of liberal constitutionalism.”